I probably already mentioned that the original Xbox came with a meager 8GB HDD drive. I had 120GB SSD lying around, so I decided to upgrade it.
Needed IDE to SATA adapter, since all SSDs are SATA, and a 80 wires IDE cable, since SATA can’t work with the 40 wires one Xbox came with. But with enough patience, I got everything I needed.
Interesting that Xbox is a clamshell, that has very long screws that hold top and bottom parts together. Also, you need star screwdriver, not a cross one common to PCs. Luckily I had all the tools I needed.
Once you disassemble the console, you can see that similarly to Dreamcast, it’s basically a PC motherboard with an integrated nVidia graphics card.
The most common trick to upgrade the HDD is called a “hot swap”. There is a single cable that connects both CDROM and HDD to the motherboard. Xbox won’t boot without a CDROM. But if you let Xbox boot up, then disconnect CDROM and connect slave HDD instead, it will recognize the drive.
I didn’t want to perform that trick at first, so I tried to just connect original HDD to my PC, and copy C and E drives. But that didn’t work out, as the drive is locked, and you cannot unlock it with USB adapter, only when connected with IDE cable.
So I went back to the hotswap method. It went smoothly: you connect the drive, then use utility called Chimp that clones it to the slave, then just swap the two.
Now I have Xbox with space enough to store every game I’m interested in.
